From today's Wall Street Journal:
DE GUSTIBUS
The Lost Art of Writing About Art
By ERIC GIBSON
April 18, 2008; Page W13
In certain circles, the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibition of contemporary art is known as "the show everybody loves to hate." Usually the criticism comes in the form of negative reviews. But this year it's different, with the brickbats directed at the exhibition's accompanying commentary instead of the art itself. Texts written by the Whitney's curators and outside contributors are being widely (and accurately) dismissed as unalloyed gibberish.
What makes this complaint particularly significant is that it comes not from the public, whom the museum might privately dismiss as benighted philistines, but from insiders -- artists and critics who know their stuff and are generally well-disposed toward the museum and its efforts.
When the show opened last month, artist and critic Carol Diehl blogged about the "impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial." As examples, she offered "random quotes" about individual artists and their work taken from the exhibition's wall texts and catalog. Among the gems:
• ". . . invents uzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion."
• "Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings."
Ms. Diehl's complaint was quickly taken up by others. Richard Lacayo, on a Time magazine blog, likened reading the show's introductory wall text ("Many of the projects . . . explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange") to "being smacked in the face with a spitball." To combat such verbiage, he recommended banning five words long popular with critics that nonetheless say nothing: "interrogates," "problematizes," "references" (as a verb), "transgressive" and "inverts."
On his Modern Art Notes blog, Tyler Green dismissed the Whitney prose as an "embarrassment" and suggested that every candidate for a contemporary-art curatorship be required to pass a writing test. And an art blogger known only as C-Monster pleaded simply for "smart writing that is precise and unmuddled," adding plaintively: "Making it enjoyable to read wouldn't hurt."
Once upon a time, art writing was all those things. Critics of an earlier age, such as John Ruskin, had no problem making themselves understood, and they are still read today. The same is true of the great art historians of the postwar era, such as Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich. Panofsky, among whose books was the definitive study of Albrecht Dürer, was a supremely elegant prose stylist. Gombrich's 1950 survey, "The Story of Art," has sold six million copies and been translated into 23 languages. By the way, English was the second language for both men. And Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, wrote catalogs on topics ranging from Matisse to Surrealism that made the mysteries of modern art accessible to the American public.
It was Marcel Duchamp who unwittingly launched art criticism on its current path of willful obscurantism. His "Readymade" art -- mass-produced commercial objects (most famously a urinal) that the artist removed from everyday utilitarian contexts and displayed in a museum -- almost required this development.
Until Duchamp, criticism was aesthetically based. The critic talked about a painting's subject, the way the artist handled color, drawing, composition and the like. With Readymades, the object's appearance and beauty were no longer the issue -- indeed, they were irrelevant. What mattered was the idea behind the work -- the point the artist was trying to make. So art criticism moved from the realm of visual experience to that of philosophy. The writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of the work of art. He could simply riff.
Conceptual art like Duchamp's took a while to catch on, but by the 1980s it had become mainstream. Around that time, academics and critics drove another nail into the coffin of accessible writing. They turned to areas outside of art and aesthetics -- disciplines such as linguistics and ideologies such as Marxism and feminism -- to interpret art.
From the late 19th century to just after World War II, writing about modern art was clear. It had to be. Critics from Émile Zola to Clement Greenberg were trying to explain new and strange art forms to a public that was often hostile to the avant-garde. To have a hope of making their case, these writers couldn't afford to obfuscate. Today, when curators and critics can count on a large audience willing to embrace new art simply because it is new, they don't have to try as hard.
Still, there is no excuse for a museum letting nonsense of the sort quoted above out in the open, particularly an institution whose mission includes educating the public. If the Whitney continues to snub this public -- its core audience -- by "explaining" art with incomprehensible drivel, it shouldn't be surprised if people decide to return the favor and walk away.
Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor. Write to Eric Gibson at eric.gibson@wsj.com
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In a dramatic coincidence worthy of Hollywood, agents from the Park Service, the IRS and Federal Police raided four museums and a gallery in Los Angeles and San Diego early this morning - smack in the middle of the Los Angeles Art Show. For added irony, there's an ad for the fair on the LA Times web page right next to the raid article and a picture of a dozen agents standing outside one of the museums. I can just imagine the buzz going on down there!
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 5082.story
At least one Bay Area institution is potentially implicated in the five year investigation into smuggled art and artifacts and inflated tax deductible donation assessments. It's a pretty sleazy story. One particularly stomach turning quote: "A senior curator at the Bowers Museum, now deceased, regularly accepted loans of objects he knew were looted from Thailand and Native American graves." Ugly.
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The first of December finds not just shoppers shopping but a big buzz of activity having to do with construction and remodeling. Most of the country is already hunkered down for the winter but here in San Francisco we are still in denial as the forecasted rain keeps getting moved back day after day, week after week. In spite of it being Saturday, we tripped over workers installing carpet in our apartment building this morning and the halls here at 251 Post were all freshly painted this week. From the back windows of the gallery we find the ongoing restoration of a building directly across from us in Maiden Lane was in full swing all day today, also unusual to have a crew over there on Saturday. This has been a long term project that hasn't shown much in the way of progress since they tore the roof off last spring. There's been a crew of from one guy in a cowboy hat to today's almost half dozen orange shirted workers working on the roof for about three months now. It's a fascinating little study of activity surrounded as it is by taller buildings on all sides. Today was especially intriguing visually, with the orange shirts, turquoise elevator, white insulation and pink vapor barrier being laid down over the long exposed wood. Anna Conti has been snapping photos of the building every time she comes in so today we decided to join in. As we are only a dozen yards from the building the workers probably wondered what we were up to. Not documenting any code violations, we promise. Nary a hard hat in sight, but the shirtless tattooed guy with the straw cowboy hat is missing, too.It can be really cool having the back of the gallery open onto Maiden Lane, we hear all kinds of live music(opera, jazz) smell the food from Mocca and watch the diners eating under awninged tables. We can see into the windows of the Britex offices and huge pattern cutting shop with hundreds of bolts of material next door. All free from the roar of traffic right below. (But not unfortunately, the power saws and jackhammers). Windows are like paintings, both the ones you look out of and the ones you look into. Which brings us to mind Rene Magritte's classic trompe l'oeil paintings titled, "The Human Condition" There are two or three versions - here's the most familiar one to me
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Paula Evers and her friend and fellow painter, Yon Nicolas, have been visiting the Bay Area for the past two weeks. It was wonderful to have them here for the opening reception, as they are both utterly delightful, not to mention talented and intelligent women. We are looking forward to hearing more about their impressions of San Francisco and Carmel, they have been indefatigable in making the rounds to all the galleries and museums in the area. It has given us tremendous insight into Paula Evers work to meet and talk with her. Her work and her character are reflections of each other. She has the magnetic power of an artist at the height of her career and the new work is as vibrant and bold and confident as the woman herself. And yet she is utterly approachable, soft spoken and charming. Her work is extremely popular in Western Europe, but it is quite unusual for San Francisco so we encourage everyone to drop by and look at these pieces, you won’t see much art of this genre, style and exceptional quality in the Bay Area.
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Christian de Cambiaire's newest video.
"Le logiciel EXPLORER génère un processus graduel qui tend à l'obscurcissement des images"
"The art software EXPLORER generates a gradual process which leads to the darkness of the images"
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